Fletch wrote on Sep 11, 2011, 13:36:A FPS with the Syndicate name is NOT a Syndicate remake. It's a completely different game, just like the new X-com is a completely different game.

What I don't really get is what they get out of making a sequel like this.. Surely the target audience of this "visceral fps" will barely even have heard of the original, whereas those who still remember the original game won't exactly be all that enthusiastic about the new direction? I guess there's a suit somewhere who figures some brand recognition is better than none...

Than wrote on Sep 7, 2011, 14:46:Indeed. The 3.5 hours was only for what was available in the beta. It *might* be the entire first act, but I suspect it's probably a subset of the first act.

It was the same deal for the Diablo 2 Open Beta as well.. You could go as far as Blood Raven, but no further, which accounted for at most 1/5 of Act 1. No idea how long D3 acts will be by comparison, though.

My understanding of recommended vs. minimum specs has always been:Minimum: It will be playable, but it is going to look like crap.Recommended: Will run and play just fine on ~medium, or possibly high if you go down in resolution; but forget running well on high. Certainly seems to be in line with the Rage specs, based on what I expect from the game..

Though, is there any performance difference at all between an 8800 and a 9800 series nvidia card? IIRC, the 9800 was basically an 8800 made on a newer process, with slightly less memory, and the tiniest bit of extra oomph to compensate.

Vulkan wrote on Aug 24, 2011, 10:11:I think Valve fixed it for HL, but it had a different movement related oddity: Hugging the walls by running forwards and towards the wall gave you extra speed.

That his was also present in Doom. With wallrunning, which, IIRC only worked on north- and eastbound walls, you could actually reach speeds high enough to outrun your own rockets.

As for strafe-jumping, iD essentially made a feature of it with Quake 3. I don't remember if it was in Q2 or Q3 they initially fixed it completely, but in any case the community wanted to keep it. In Q3 default, you could still strafe-run and get around the maps quite a bit faster and more noisily than with regular running, but your maximum velocity was capped (at least without mods), whereas in Q1 your speed would keep increasing for as long as you could keep going.

I beat the first two, but I just get bored playing this. Just face a direction, hold down the run/climb button, and just go..if anybody gets in my way, just stab them until I win...end of story.

Ditto. The series hasn't really evolved in terms of depth or challenge. Platforming still consists of holding down a button and combat still consists of holding Block, then pressing Counter when enemies attack you one at a time. Assassinations are still completely linear and scripted. They've added new weapons, items and features to each entry in the series but they've completely failed to improve the inherently shallow fundamentals.

It's like playing a slightly interactive movie with a very convoluted storyline.

It's hard to disagree regarding difficulty. The games have gotten progressively easier to the point where I think it was practically impossible to die in Brotherhood, short of actively trying to fail or the auto-navigation screwing you over while jumping around in high places.. Between the smoke bombs, health potions and whatever else you have at your disposal, you could basically brute force through every single encounter of Brotherhood with virtually no challenge.

The original vision for the game seemed to have more in place in terms of misdirection and stealth than what the series eventually evolved into. One of the first trailers/demos for AC1 included creating a distraction by throwing a guard off a rooftop, causing the other guards to run in and investigate the accident while you could sneak through the gate they'd previously been guarding etc. You can still do that type of stuff in some instances in AC2/Brotherhood as well, but in general it's not implemented in a consistent way that you can get a handle on and use effectively. Sometimes, guards appear to be unable to look up, like that time in AC1 where you enter one of the cities by free-running across some beams placed a whopping two feet above the guards' heads.. And yet, in that instance, they won't see you. Other times, though, you'd be spotted from a mile away. The games' line-of-sight rules just doesn't seem that consistent, and while there were one or two sections in Brotherhood that would award you by going through undetected, in the end, I didn't bother and just powered through.

For all of that, I've really enjoyed this series mainly for its atmosphere, though. It's like the popcorn-flick of gaming, and I'll definitely be picking up Revelations as well, even though my enjoyment had slight drop in Brotherhood with increased focus on the dumb metaplot.

bigspender wrote on Aug 18, 2011, 18:34:trine 1 was one of the most fun 3 player experiences I've ever had the pleasure to enjoy - get some control pads, some drinks and snacks, and tv you can see from the moon. set the game on the hardest difficulty and say good bye to 6-8 hours of your day :)

At least up until the last level. Way to set fire to everyone's fun with that one! It was bad enough when playing alone, but co-op, it was absolutely ridiculous

Creston wrote on Aug 17, 2011, 00:18:Haha, yep, except that in some cases there were no rooftops to be found. And yeah, if every battle has a Cerberus assault droid in it, it'll get boring, but I doubt that. It's more of a mini-boss, plus you can snipe the dude out of the cockpit and use the bot yourself, so it'll likely be a pretty rare encounter.

The cerberus regulars also appear to have jetpacks in the video, though. One appears at 0:35, not quite dropping out of orbit, but rather from the "2nd floor" of stacked galactic standard-containers As long as that's only done "up-front" to set up the fight, as it were, allowing you to gauge the level of opposition somewhat accurately, I'm totally fine with it.. It would be no worse than enemies coming out of doors in the distance in ME2 or any other first person shooter. Just as long as they don't pull a DA2. I envision glorious fights with five dudes, another five dudes, yet another wave of five dudes, and then five more for good measure. Preferably appearing behind you while fighting two YMIR mechs on insanity.

Mashiki Amiketo wrote on Aug 16, 2011, 17:45:Wait. Did I just see "spawning" enemies jumping out from the sky? Didn't they learn *not* to do that from DA2?

An assault bot that drops into a middle of a battle, to me, is logical. Five archers that fall out of the sky right beside your mage is not.

I doubt Bioware understands the difference, but they were very good with enemy reinforcements and how they entered the fray in ME2, so hopefully they haven't forgotten. (or, rather, hopefully Casey Hudson tells that Dragon Age 2 dipshit producer to get FAR FAR away from this game.)

Creston

Technically, if you stretched it one MIGHT say they jumped down from rooftops etc

Then again, what's going to matter is how this is implemented. Logical or no, if a great number of encounters are based around waves of jetpack-troopers dropping from the sky, it's going to suck. If the mechanic is used sparingly, it might not be so bad..

Crustacean Soup wrote on Aug 15, 2011, 03:13:Well, you play FS or tech tracks without knowing what you're doing, and you're pretty much always going to rank badly (and in a large server, that's a pretty high number). I guess it's probably kind of demoralizing. TM has a pretty nasty learning curve.

There's also people who just want the points. Nadeo capped lol servers at 60,000 because of that, IIRC.

I can see some short/lol servers being entertaining for awhile, what gets me is just how many of them there are.

Yeah, there seems to be twice as many LOL servers as every other gametype combined. I think it's great that the game has that kind of versatility with essentially different sub-games made possible by creative use of the level editor. But at the same time it also makes me a bit sad to see so many LOL servers (and lately, to some degree, the bizarrely named "RPG" servers), because they kind'a cannibalize the influx of players for other game modes. After all, it's not like players new to the game are going to join the ghost town tech servers when the LOL servers are fully populated and therefore always at the top of the server list.. The introduction of freezone made this even worse (for stadium-players, at least).

JohnBirshire wrote on Aug 12, 2011, 15:16:PC Gamer supposedly gave it a 94, and the reviewer stated it was the best game he played in the last 4 years. He also claims to be a tremendous fan of the original Deus Ex.

Unfortunately you have to take everything PC Gamer says with a grain of salt, as they have a reputation for being a little...sensational...with their reviews. But it certainly did get me excited, this game might pull it off after all!

Well, it's not an EA game, and I don't know of PC Gamer ever having been bought on a previous Eidos game before, so it might be genuine.

Creston

Don't forget Gerstmanngate, not to mention the whole deal with Tomb Raider Underworld Between the two episodes, I can't think of a publisher with a more well-publicized history of attempted metacritic tweaking. As for PC Gamer, another game that got 94: DA2

Bumpy wrote on Aug 3, 2011, 13:18:Won't RAGE be making this game look and play kind of weak?

If they make this one proper on PC I might buy it but RAGE seems way better.

I really don't think RAGE is going to be comparable to BL in any way. May as well compare it to Fallout 3 in that case. The similarities basically end at post-apocalyptic setting + first person perspective.

As far as BL1 goes, I personally didn't enjoy it much. Aside from stats and skills being a bit wonky as others have already pointed out, my main complaint was the whole bullet-sponge gameplay. None of the enemies had any kind of interesting behaviour as far as I can remember (haven't touched the game since release so my memory could be a bit fuzzy). Not even a bit of stagger as you shot them in the face.. Just point, shoot to burn down HP. Rinse, repeat. And oh god, the vehicles... And the "supreme" tickling-power of the mounted guns

The concept had a lot of promise, though. If they fix the balance/itemization issues and make the core gameplay more engaging, they'll have a winner. I'll definitely be keeping BL2 on my radar.

Krovven wrote on Aug 1, 2011, 16:33:This is real money. It's to get it off the shady sites and to give Blizzard a piece of the cut. If anything, it's going to devalue items because it won't just be the pro's businesses running the market, it will be everyone, making it if anything, less appealing to the pro businesses.

It's also going to significantly increase the number of people who use real cash to buy items/gold, though. When there's a sanctioned and safe way to do it, rather than having to go through some shady site, more people are going to use that option. One can only hope they've got some fairly robust counter-measures for duping this time.

On that note, I wonder if the AH will be available to players during ladder races? Though to my knowledge, there's been no information as yet on how the ladder is going to work this time around, of if there's even going to be one.

Doesn't really bother me much either way though. Like someone mentioned earlier in the thread, I'll just opt out of items-for-cash completely since I'm only going to play with friends anyway.

Krovven wrote on Jun 23, 2011, 11:58:Always accuse of lying first because if you are wrong you can back out and you have a 50/50 shot on the next choice. Truth or Doubt and you are stuck with your choice, right or wrong. Throw in Intuition points (which you get tons of) just makes the whole thing pointless.

Ugh, I've found myself unable to even finish the game due to how terrible and inconsistent the whole interview/interrogation mechanic is. The Zeropunctuation review had a hilariously accurate take on it.

TheDagda509 wrote on Jun 6, 2011, 21:47:Halo CE with Reach graphics. Ooooh!! I can't wait to pay 60 bucks for a game I already played 10 times over the last 7-8 years.

Based on the post-conference interview on GT, it won't carry a full retail price but will probably be priced similarly to ODST. Not quite expansion price, but not $<price of new game> either.

Still, if all they've done is put a new graphical layer on top (though switching back and forth could be a fun novelty in places), Halo CE would've needed some serious level re-design for me to touch the campaign again. There were quite a few cut&paste levels that just went on and on and on... Ugh.